Civil & Strange

by Clair Ni Aonghusa

  “I don’t remember much about this part, except that it was a bit grim.”

  He orders coffee and smiles, but he’s not his usual self. A tension in his face, a particular tautness about the eyes and jaw, makes him look severe.

  “Look, I’m sorry about that call,” Ellen says.

  “Not at all. You did the right thing.”

  “I don’t know any longer what the right thing is. It must have come as a shock.”

  “Bit of an eye-opener,” he says harshly.

  She recalls their exchanges on the phone, his cordial “How’re you, Ellen?” and the invitation to “fire away” with whatever it was she had to say. He didn’t query anything she told him about Matt, but she became conscious of heavy breathing at his end. She heard equivocation in his cough and in the silence that followed. “I hope you won’t think me too interfering,” she had said.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” he answered in a tone so chill it sent a reverberation down her spine. “Thanks for letting me know,” he said and put down the phone.

  “I can’t figure out — I don’t understand why Matt’s doing this,” she says now.

  “Why he isn’t happier in himself now that my mother’s gone, you mean?”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that. I’m not even sure we should be talking about it.”

  “You rang me,” he says dryly.

  “I feel like the great betrayer.”

  “You think I’ve taken offense.”

  “Well, of course. I’d understand. Strictly speaking, it’s none of my business.”

  Stephen studies his hands. “I’m very glad you rang, Ellen. So is Colum, for that matter. It’s not easy to get under my father’s skin, and I owe him a lot. He headed Mum off about me taking over the farm… and it cost him.”

  “Do you ever regret not taking it on?”

  There’s a self-contained element to Stephen that makes him complicated and difficult to gauge. Although he’s always perfectly friendly and polite when they meet, she feels that they never connect properly. If he comes across her in the pub in Eugene’s company, he’ll join them for a drink, but he has been in her house only once, and that was because Matt asked if he wanted to see the place. Ellen wouldn’t dream of suggesting they meet up as she has no idea how he would react. For all that, she likes him.

  He shrugs. “Farming? Not really. It’s a hard life. Costs keep going up and income keeps coming down. It’s harder and harder to make a living from it. Plus, there’s more physical work than I’d ever want to do, and Dad hasn’t modernized much. If I had a family and a working wife I might feel differently. Then there’s the question of what’s likely to happen in dairy farming. Our farm will seem small by the standards of how big farms are going to become.”

  “I know nothing about farming.”

  “Where’s that coffee?” he says, looking about. He signals the waitress. “The way it is, Ellen, it’d be fine in the summer, when the place is full of visitors, but I couldn’t hack it in the winter. The old way of life is gone. The neighborliness has vanished. It’s quite an isolated existence.”

  “I know what you mean. And we get more extremes of weather here. Dublin didn’t get any of that snow we had recently.”

  He nods. “At least you’re living in the village. Farms are cut off from the general run of things.”

  The waitress delivers the coffees and smiles. Girls smile at Stephen all the time. He’s a handsome man, and that suggestion of remoteness is intriguing.

  “You’re a hit there,” teases Ellen. “She’d go out with you if you asked.”

  He turns to have a look. “No, thanks,” he says, then smiles. He has a slightly distracted air. She suspects him of being uneasy about the topic of his father. “You don’t have to discuss Matt with me,” she says.

  He shakes his head. “That’s not it. I’ve been thinking about what you said, all that stuff about Dad. It got to me. There’s something about his generation. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.”

  “That particular generation, you mean?”

  “Yeah. So different. From us, I mean. But then again, the bloody economy was down the tubes in the world they grew up in. The politicians were almost worse than useless. Nobody was given any quarter, unless they were part of an elite — the Church, the judiciary, the politicos — and those boyos were very adept at defending their power base. Loads of people were forced to pack their bags and take the boat. What hope was there? Where were the opportunities? Neither my dad nor yours got any breaks. The choices were toughen up or go under, effectively one choice. I never knew my grandmother, but I believe she was one goddamn awful bitch, a strong woman, ruled the household with a rod of iron. Your father’s escape route was into the priesthood — it was that or take on the farm. Dad had no prospects, no way of staying on in school, and no way of escaping unless he ran away. He didn’t want the farm, and he wasn’t keen on marrying my mother, but he ended up being landed with both.” Stephen leans forward, controlled, impelled. “I try to get inside his head, Ellen. I try to imagine it. But it’s impossible. It must be almost surreal for him to see how circumstances have changed for us — the immensity of it — bloody difficult to accept.”

  He is silent, as if he’s fallen into a reverie. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” she says to rouse him. “They might as well have been living on a different planet.”

  “Exactly. The Church ruled the roost. And we know how it reveled in all that power. A priest, bishop, brother, or nun lurking around every corner, ready to swoop down if you deviated a centimeter from the prescribed course and expel you into outer darkness. If you dared to cross them, they could block your promotion, cost you your job or position, disgrace you socially, hold you up to ridicule, and effectively ruin your life. Bloody awful country then, full of things that couldn’t be said, full of silences, the confessionals doing the work of spies, the thought police. And it took the sex- and child-abuse scandals to weaken the hold they had over people.” He cradles his mug, as if for warmth, and accepts a refill from the waitress who is hovering, perhaps eavesdropping. “I know you know this, Ellen, but bear with me,” he says. “It must be galling for Dad to see our generation having it so easy, expecting to have a say in how we run our lives, demanding certain things as rights. Rights? The concept didn’t exist in their day. Nobody gives a damn about values anymore. Nobody agonizes about things. Young people thumb their noses at authority, go gadding about, hardly aware of their good fortune, indifferent to everything really. What his generation suffered is forgotten, unappreciated, and unrecognized. Their world, their touchstones, just disintegrated. They have nothing to show for all that loss.”

  “Whole lives an exercise in denial.”

  “Well, here’s the riddle.” He jabs an index finger into the oil-skin tablecloth. “What do they do with all those emotions? They’re difficult to expunge. How do they come to terms with that?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest.”

  “Rhetorical question. I’m doing the talking. Keep up.” He waves an admonishing finger at her and looks mischievous.

  “I can see how you ended up being a lecturer,” she sneers.

  “Okay. They fall into two camps — accept or deny. Tough choice whichever route you take. Some of them can’t bear to acknowledge it. It’s too painful. They don’t want to come to terms with the way life used to be — so they re-create the past, reinvent it. Think of Mrs. Gormley. You know her, don’t you? She suffered an atrocious marriage to a waster of a husband. He battered her, drank, and gambled any money he could lay his hands on. She survived whatever way she had to, used all her cunning against him. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. No respite, except whatever satisfaction she got from the children. Decades of misery she put in, and there was no love lost between them. She hated him, hated the misery he inflicted on her and her children. When he fell ill, she was thrilled because she realized that he was going to die. There was no reconciliation, no big coming together. He was
an awful man. Difficult to the end. I’d say she didn’t relax till he breathed his last. Signs on it, she never shed a tear for him. Nevertheless, once he was dead and buried, she began to change her tune. Now that he was definitely out of the picture, she began to pretend that he hadn’t been so bad.”

  “You’re joking.” Ellen has met this Mrs. Gormley, a stooped little woman with wiry gray hair and a singsong voice.

  “No, I was struck by it at the time. Happened about eight years ago. It began with little things. She’d startle someone by coming out with the like of ‘Con was very partial to classical music’ or ‘He loved nature’ and everyone would be flabbergasted. Complete fabrication. The man was a stranger to finer feelings. His only talents were drinking, gambling, and terrorizing his family. I think she couldn’t come to terms with the notion that decades of her life had been flushed down the drain because of that man. Over the years she has reinvented him so that he’s become a kind of saint. She keeps a photograph of him in the hall. She says not a day passes but she misses him. She makes out she’s deprived because he’s not around. She attributes little sayings to him, invents nice little touches, composites of things she’s heard other women say about their husbands. She wants to be able to boast about the wonderful life he gave her. She needs to claim back her due and keep her place in the pecking order. The truth is she’d wither away if he were to come back. But I suspect she half believes her fictions — she needs to believe them. They’re what keep her going.”

  “But that isn’t true of Matt,” Ellen says. “That’s not the way he copes.”

  “Too honest. That’s his trouble.”

  “He must be desolate at the moment.”

  “It’s like a cancer eating him up.”

  “Is that what you think, Stephen? I do too.” She sees no hope for Matt, just unremitting bleakness, his face set against the world.

  Stephen sips his cooling coffee. The waitress materializes, and he asks for the bill, throwing a careless, charming smile her way.

  “If he could just let go — stop hanging on to his anger.”

  “There’s the challenge,” says Stephen. “How do we encourage that? He’s a healthy man, fit and active, nobody’s fool. There’s no way I could mention any of what we’ve been talking about. He wouldn’t tolerate it for an instant.”

  “It’s all very grim, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll get this,” he says as Ellen fumbles for money to pay for her coffee.

  “It’s easy for us though,” she says as he walks her to her car. “Even if things aren’t going our way, we’ve got a good chunk of life ahead of us. He’s probably wondering how much time he has left.”

  Stephen nods. “Exactly. For the next while I intend to come down fairly regularly at weekends. He has to keep himself in check when I’m about, puts up a big front. Colum can’t get away so easily, young family and all that, but he’s promised to visit the occasional weekend.”

  “That’ll give Matt something to look forward to.”

  She sits into her car. He leans on the open door and looks down at her. “It’s early days yet. We’ll give him a chance to come round. Look, I’d better go. I said I’d help out with the milking.”

  “You’re having a working weekend?”

  He smiles. “I don’t mind that. Nice talking to you, Ellen. See you next weekend.”

  Beatrice presses the doorbell but there’s no reply. She calls out, “Hello” and “Is anybody here?” Following the sound of voices, she finds herself at the top of the steps that wind their way through Ellen’s back garden.

  She peers down and can make out two forms, one half-hidden by the dense foliage, another taller person feeding a fire in front of the boundary wall with discarded branches. Beyond the wall surges the swollen dun-colored river, its steep banks edged by trees. The branches of a willow tree trail in the water as if on the point of plunging in.

  Close to the clamorous water, Eugene and Ellen work in harmony, she chopping brambles and weeds with large shears, he raking and forking up after her. He carries a load to the bonfire, throws on the vegetation, and aerates the fire with a digging fork.

  He looks up and catches Beatrice watching them. “Hello there!” he shouts, and bounds up the steps two at a time. “Ellen thought she heard something a while back but we were too engrossed in the work. We’re clearing the lower levels, hacking it all back.”

  The steps are strewn with displaced earth and grass. Beatrice picks her route carefully, trying to step on the clear spots. Ellen grins from under a wide-brimmed straw hat. Her fingers are dirty and her face is grimy with streaks of clay. She looks like something out of a hillbilly show, her hair tied back in an untidy ponytail, a coat covering torn jeans and Wellingtons. She’s wearing gloves with no fingers.

  “It must be decades since anyone turned a sod in this place,” Beatrice says. “How’d you rope Eugene in?”

  “He’s the driving force behind this, said he was sick and tired of looking out at a wilderness.”

  “You two didn’t waste much time getting together, did you?” declares Beatrice.

  Ellen flushes but Eugene looks happy. He heaps hewn branches and dead weeds onto the fork and offloads them onto the fire. Ellen rests the blade end of her shears on the ground.

  “You never gave any indication, Ellen,” Beatrice accuses.

  “We started only yesterday.”

  “I don’t mean the work, I mean him,” she says, pointing at Eugene.

  “That’s only very recent,” Ellen says, looking uncomfortable. “I’m being low-key about it.”

  “Yeah, it’s very private,” Eugene says. “She has a furtive side to her nature.”

  Ellen looks annoyed. “Discretion is the better part of valor. Teacher in a Catholic school and all that.”

  “She makes me look for permission to put my arm around her in public. I keep telling her the Church isn’t a power broker anymore.”

  “Some of those changes are only skin deep. Lots of squinting windows still about,” Beatrice says.

  Ellen nods. “People can be very prickly.”

  “You’re just substituting for somebody else. How can it matter what you do in your free time?” Eugene says. “They should be thrilled to land someone of your caliber.”

  Ellen smiles. “He thinks I’m good at my job because he’s heard a few stories.”

  “I’ve heard good reports too. They’re very pleased with you.”

  “See what I mean. There are no secrets here. What if I wanted to transfer to the school here? There might be an opening later this year. Don’t want to blot my copybook, do I?” Ellen works the shears energetically and shuts them with a snap. “Fancy a cup of tea, Beatrice? I could do with a breather.”

  “I’ll dampen down the fire and join you,” Eugene says.

  “I’ll be stiff tomorrow,” Ellen says, massaging her lower back with her hands. “I haven’t done physical work like that in years.”

  “I can’t but think of the cousins. Sarah would be delighted with this clearance. She was the force behind the garden.”

  “I like to think she’d be pleased.”

  “So, tell us about Eugene,” Beatrice says with a playful nudge.

  Ellen flushes. “Nothing to tell.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s been brewing since the time he came to quote for the kitchen.”

  “Instant attraction?”

  “Sort of — although I fought it. He says I was hard won.”

  “I love a romance. There’s less of it about than people realize.” “It’s not so straightforward. Me being older for one thing.” She grins. “I can’t believe it. I’d given up on all that.”

  “Is it serious?”

  They enter the kitchen by the back door. Ellen prizes off her Wellingtons. “One day at a time, Beatrice. That’s the way we’re taking it.”

  “You’re looking well.”

  “He likes me with my hair longer,” Ellen says dreamily. She laughs. “Y
ou’ll think I’ve gone soft in the head.”

  “Not at all. I’m delighted for you.”

  Ellen puts on the kettle. “It’s nice here, isn’t it, the house and everything, the privacy?”

  “Fantastic outlook over the back wall.” Suddenly, Beatrice can’t pretend an interest she doesn’t particularly feel. She can’t contain herself any longer. “Ellen, could I tell you something?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s not something I’d want known generally.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t go tittle-tattling around the village.”

  “Paula rang last night. She ran into Andy in London.”

  “I remember him but I didn’t know him as such. How is he?”

  “You probably don’t know, but he hasn’t been in touch with any of the family since he fell out with his dad years ago. Typical of Jack to choose the wrong moment to bring up the subject of money. We were on our way to a restaurant in Cork to celebrate Andy’s graduation — Andy had to repeat his final year — when Jack began to taunt him, going on and on about how much extra his education had cost us. It might have been meant as a joke — Jack had an odd sense of humor — but Andy took it badly, reared up, and stormed off. He drove straight home, cleared out his room, and… we haven’t seen or heard from him since. Anyway, Paula broke the ice. He’s married and has a son, and she thinks he’s going to get in touch. I probably shouldn’t say anything —”

  “Wouldn’t that be wonderful!” Ellen hugs her. “Of all people, Beatrice, you deserve to have this come right. Are you going to make contact?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. He has to make the first move. I’d be afraid he’d slam the phone down.”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t.”

  The front doorbell rings. “Damn,” Ellen says and goes to answer it. She makes a surprised face at Beatrice when Matt follows her back into the kitchen.

  “Beatrice! I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he says and stops.

  “There’s nothing to interrupt. Come in.”

  “Sit down, Matt,” Ellen says. “Tea or coffee?”

  “What about a drink?”

  “I’m afraid the cupboard is bare.”